The case for minor utopias

The 20th century showed how dangerous utopian ideas can be. Does that mean we should follow John Gray and abandon all political idealism? Or is a more modest strain of visionary thinking—with human rights at its foundation—still possible?

In June 2002, President Bush delivered a speech to the US Military Academy at West Point that marked the beginning of the road to war with Iraq. The speech is remembered for Bush’s unveiling of his doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence, but alongside this principle Bush also gave a statement of America’s guiding values, designed to prove that US power need not be feared. “America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish,” Bush told his audience. “We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves—safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life.”

The idea of utopia was invoked again in the Bush administration’s national security strategy, published a few months after the West Point address. The central theme of this document, intended to present a definitive statement of US foreign policy, was that America would seek “a balance of power that favours freedom.” The report said that America had joined battle during the 20th century with totalitarian regimes based on “militant visions of class, nation and race which promised utopia and delivered misery.” Now facing a terrorist threat—which the administration would soon characterise as a new form of totalitarianism—the US, the report continued, could use its pre-eminent position in the world to usher in “decades of peace, prosperity and liberty.” The aim of American strategy, in short, was “to help make the world not just safer but better.”

One reaction to this rhetoric is to wonder how anyone can, with a straight face, decry the deadly consequences of utopianism while promising to build an era of universal peace and freedom. Now that we know the full scale of the debacle that Bush’s invasion of Iraq produced, it is hard not to see it as a natural consequence of such a failure of self-awareness. The collision of idealism and devastation in Bush’s Iraq policy raises in a new form a series of questions about politics and social engineering whose roots reach back through the fall of the Soviet Union to the earlier upheavals of the 20th century. After Auschwitz and the gulag, after the killing fields of Cambodia and the cultural revolution, must we reject all transformative political and social projects as inherently destructive? Is it right to see the neoconservative project of exporting democracy as itself utopian, sharing some kind of…

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